Full House is a stylish bookstore and cafe run by critically-acclaimed Japanese novelist Yu Miri. It is located near the JR Odaka Station in Minamisoma City, in the coastal area of Fukushima prefecture.
Full House is located on the ground floor of a refurbished house. The interior is wooden and elegant, and there is a selection of books in Japanese chosen by the author. The cafe serves meals like pasta and doria, as well as desserts and drinks with seasonal options.
Author Yu Miri is famously known for her novel Tokyo Ueno Station (translated into English by Morgan Giles), which won the U.S. National Book Award in the Translated Literature category in 2019.
Following 3.11, Ms. Miri has worked extensively to communicate the stories of residents of evacuated towns and villages in Fukushima’s coastal area, and has been living in Minamisoma City since 2015.
When Ms. Miri moved to Minamisoma, there were no other bookstores open in the area —the few bookstores that had been there before 3.11 had closed following the evacuation—, so she decided to open her own in 2018, and named it ‘Full House’ after one of her novels.
But something was missing. She quickly realized that people who traveled all the way to visit the store wanted to sit down with a warm drink, and there weren’t many restaurants or cafes nearby yet, so she decided to turn Full House into a book cafe the following year.
Today, Full House is a lively and cozy hub where locals and visitors can bond over their love of coffee and literature.
